January 2010 Issue

The 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair Poll

Americans would chisel J.F.K. up high and dial Britney down very low, and they hope there’s an ark in their future. Don’t even ask about the public option. 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair team up for a new monthly national survey.Click here to view the complete results.

John F. Kennedy is the president 29 percent of Americans would most like to see added to Mount Rushmore. Forty percent of Democrats voted for Kennedy, while Ronald Reagan drew 52 percent of Republicans. The appeal of L.B.J.—who gave us Medicare and the Voting Rights Act but has yet to shake Vietnam—was equal across the board: 0 percent. It’s tempting to wonder how Kennedy and Reagan might have fared against Richard Nixon (not part of the survey): would the giddy possibilities of that Nixon nose—think of the waterslide!—have trumped partisan politics?

Speaking of Nixon, the famously missing portion of Watergate-era audiotape ranked low in our which-lost-artifact-would-you-most-like-to-find question. Noah’s Ark won easily, with 43 percent of those polled and 65 percent of Evangelical Christians. And yet 7 percent of Evangelicals—not many, but still one in 14—chose finding the Nixon tape over the ark and everything else, which included some potential revenue streams of significance. Does that choice suggest on the part of the American public a certain seriousness—which also surfaces in the question about which important ceremony we would most like to take part in? Because there we shrugged off lighting Olympic torches and flipping Super Bowl coins in overwhelming favor of laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Evidence that Americans with lower incomes tend to use the postal service more than richer Americans (56 percent of those with incomes under $30,000, 30 percent of those with incomes over $100,000) baffled us briefly. Could the very rich really be doing all their bill paying and correspondence online? Then it hit us: staff! Whether we’re rich or poor, overseas delivery may not be a priority: we’re just not very interested in the world beyond our borders, at least not as a place to raise children. France is the country of choice for those who would take such a step—maybe surprising, in light of that country’s role as our traditional punching bag (sac de sable). Fifty-eight percent of us said, No thanks, we’ll stay right here. What could be more certain, in our hearts, than that? Only one thing, it turns out: most of us couldn’t even begin to explain what the “public option” means.

Several high profile musicians want to discover if their songs were played at painfully high volumes to Guantánamo detainees. Of the artists below, which one would you LEAST WANT TO HEAR at painfully high volume?